It really is annoying when you have spent time and effort on a large campaign then out of the blue, a good number of the keywords turn inactive for search. Normally, the way around that is to substantially increase the minimum CPC to a specified amount.
One such client account had over 14,000 of their keywords set to inactive for search and this was despite the fact they were the only advertiser bidding on those keywords in most cases. For some keywords we increased the CPC as suggested by Google but there were still a good 5000 inactive. In Yahoo however, we could bid on all the keywords at a much lower cost. So we stopped spending a good deal of the client budget on Google and moved most of it across to Yahoo. The traffic now seems to be the most cost efficient and effective.
So with us moving 70% of the Google spend to Yahoo, what do you think happened next?
You guessed it, Google now wanted to help and we were given a new set of account managers to oversee the campaign. To be honest I got quite irate and told them that I wasn’t simply going to increase the CPC to a stupid amount to get traffic for extremely specific terms. I made it clear that I will stand by the policy of transferring budget to Yahoo where the costs were much lower and the traffic in general was greater.
Google being Google didn’t give up and sent me a fairly long winded email with tips that can dramatically improve the Quality Score and when used properly should apparently serve as a way to prevent keywords suddenly going inactive for search. See below for the suggestions from them and maybe they could help you.
Number 1
Dynamic keyword insertion:
Quality Score is worked out prior to the keyword being inserted. So to increase Quality Score, look at creating 2 or 3 versions of ad text without DKI.
Number 2
Keyword inclusion in ad text:
Make sure when you create ad text you use the actual keyword in the ad text. This makes well targeted ad text and increases the Quality Score.
Number 3
Pause poor quality score keywords:
Keywords with a poor quality score bring down the overall history of the account and ultimately affect the quality score. By pausing these, you can increase the quality score.
I hope these prove useful for you.
Adam
PPC Consultant
